Parental control systems for computers and television have become increasingly popular as more and more homes have access to the Internet and extensive cable or satellite television offerings. With respect to computers and Internet usage, parents especially want to know what their children are doing when they use the computer, including the web sites they visit and the individuals with whom they are communicating.
Some applications, such as those provided by Internet service providers MSN and America Online (AOL), provide parental controls, but they are limited to restricting and auditing usage of features inside the application. Another problem with existing parental controls solutions is that the parents receive fragmented audit reports when their children use multiple computers located throughout the home. For example, if a child uses a computer in the kitchen and then a computer in his room, the parent will get two reports that he or she will have to cross reference manually. In the multiple-computer household, children might attempt to circumvent parental controls by purposefully using different computers to get more time on the computer than allowed, or to use a computer having a program (or unrestricted access to the Internet) that is not available on their own computer. Efforts to maintain such information in a centralized server outside of the home but accessible to the parents raises privacy issues that makes such a solution undesirable.
Connecting the household computers to a home network might offer parents some additional control, such as providing a single point of access to the Internet from which certain computers in the home may be disconnected from time to time. But unlike a managed computing network environment, common to business and other large-scale computing networks, the typical home network is an unmanaged network that offers parents little in the way of control. For example, a home network does not typically incorporate a primary domain controller for regulating user access or centralized data file storage. Instead, many unmanaged computing networks require individual user management in terms of regulating user security authorization to use the various computing devices on the network. Further, most unmanaged networks require additional user participation and knowledge to store, recall and synchronize content stored on the various computing devices on the network. As a consequence, the home network offers few benefits in terms of parental control, since existing parental control solutions in a home network are constrained by the network's limitations to operate independently on each computing device, just the same as if the device were not on the network. Moreover, the home network may also introduce other problems, such as providing the children access to unprotected files on the parents' computer, such as the parents' financial or other personal files, e.g. Microsoft Money, etc.
Another problem with existing parental control systems today is that third party applications using a proprietary parental control system are forced to log events so that they conform to the style dictated by the proprietary system's auditing schema. Since not all applications that the parents install on their computers will conform to the proprietary auditing schema, there may be gaps in the audit reports generated by the parent control system. Parents are, therefore, unable to get the full picture of their children's computer usage. For example, parents may not be aware of which games, movies, or other activities their children are involved in using computers in the home.